The In-House Trend; Merkle On The Market

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Why In-House?

Netflix’s senior manager of programmatic buying, Kathy O’Dowd, says protecting data is a big reason for in-house programmatic. “There’s a lot of intellectual property that we want to keep internal. And that’s made a lot easier when we’re internal,” she disclosed during a panel in Advertising Week in NYC, as reported by Ad Age’s Alex Kantrowitz. Kellogg’s insights and analytics director, Aaron Fetters, agreed: “We’ve learned a lot about the value and power of first-party data.” O’Dowd and Fetters jointly pointed to a need for internal collaboration when taking programmatic in-house, and said agencies continue to play a crucial role. Ad Age has more.

‘Hundreds Of These Platforms’

Investors are glum about the outcomes of recent ad tech IPOs, but Merkle CEO David Williams isn’t worried. Speaking to Fortune, he said, “Valuation has clearly been a problem here in the ad tech space. Some of these companies really entered the market too early, while some are really just products.” But he added that the long-term value of new players has yet to be seen. “Within the decade there is going to be hundreds of these platforms,” Williams posited. “From a marketing perspective, it will be a whole new world to figure out the value of these individual platforms but more importantly how you understand the value across platforms.” More.

There Will Be Likes

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is extending its “like” button to mobile devices, and the functionality is now available to third-party Android and iOS developers for apps of all shapes and sizes. In a blog post, Facebook explained, “People using a mobile app can directly Like the app’s Facebook Page, or any Open Graph object within the app, and share on Facebook. The mobile Like Button works seamlessly with the Facebook account the person is logged into on [sic] their device, allowing people to Like any piece of content, while in your native app.” A new signal for the app marketer.

Google: Let’s Get Physical

Google’s making a bet on the Internet of Things with The Physical Web, an initiative that aims to enable connected devices in the wild – think bus-stop kiosks, vending machines, movie posters, parking meters – to communicate with smartphones sans apps. Need to know what time your bus is scheduled to arrive? Just walk up to the bus stop. It’ll tell you. As the project’s website notes: “Everything should be just a tap away.” Cool. But a question for Google: What do you plan to do with the data?

But Wait. There’s More!